[Jon Stratis]

Recruiting business-minded kids is hard - they hear "robotics team" and find out the rest of your pitch, even if that pitch has nothing to do about the robot.

To help with that, we've been inviting in guest speakers from local companies to work directly with our business team for a night or two. Someone to talk about websites, someone about branding, someone about finances, someone about grant writing, etc. Then we advertise to the entire school " there will be a speaker coming to talk about grant writing next Monday from 6-9.". The only mention of the team at all is a small tag at the very end, "sponsored by The Robettes". That gets kids interested in that topic in the door while helping the kids we already have signed up learn a bit more about their job. And once a kid comes to that first meeting, you have a bit of a captive audience and can talk to them about everything the business team does. It's less scary for them if they see first hand that they can go to one of your meetings and never touch a tool or walk into the shop.